Considering the growing economic and social uncertainty, administrative dilemmas of limited resources, diverse demands of residents, complexity and interconnectedness of local development planning, regional collaboration has been important elements of local governance. Collaboration among multiple local authorities can managed more efficiently facilities or delivered public services. Although interlocal cooperation and regional collaboration allows localities to achieve better results than they could alone, they are not always success because of traction cost and institutional collective action problems.

We review of literature review of institutional collective action mechanism and regional collaboration cases of Korea. We classify the types of regional collaboration by institutional collective action mechanism.  We also can find relation between types of mechanism and what types of policy or service area, how many local governments participated in. Next we examine what factors facilitate or be successful to collaboration. Data get from mail survey of local government officials who are responsible for implementing regional development as well as in-depth interview. Zero inflated poison model and Negative binomial model be used for this finding.

The urban agglomeration is a kind of cooperation body in a certain area, which is closely related to the spatial, economic, administrative and social factors. The cooperation consciousness and cooperation action of urban local governments are important institutional supports of Urban Agglomeration. In accordance with the framework of institutional collective action, the cooperation action of local government presents the diversity of choice in mechanism. The choice of these mechanisms is affected by transaction cost and cooperation risk, including the cooperation mechanism under the motivation of complementarity, the coordination mechanism under the motivation of risk, and the organization mechanism under the motivation of execution, and it forms bilateral relations, multilateral relations and whole relations on the structure of collaborative governance. We put forward the hypothesis of the trend of inter governmental cooperation network, and construct the relationship between institutional arrangements and the trend of bilateral and multilateral networks. When addressing either inter-jurisdictional or functional externalities, institutional collective action (ICA) dilemmas arise primarily due to the political and administrative fragmentation (Feiock 2013). Instead of resorting to the central government for solutions, local governments can choose to coordinate with each other in a variety of ways to overcome collective inaction dilemmas. Scholars in public administration have long recognized the importance of interlocal agreements in the delivery of public services (Atkins, 1996; Carr, LeRoux, & Shrestha, 2009; Chen & Thurmaier, 2009; Thurmaier & Wood, 2002; Andrew, 2009), Zeemering (2008) describes the interlocal agreements (ILAs) as an “innovative governance arrangement” and one of the crucial “features of contemporary local government management.” ILAs can take many forms, ranging from an informal “handshake” agreement to elaborate contracts structured. Interlocal agreements enhance regional cooperation by integrating activities vertically and horizontally among different units of government and enable local governments to cope with problems arising from a polycentric governance system (Carr et al., 2009; Thurmaier & Wood, 2002).Feiock and Scholz(2010) suggested ILAs provide self-organizing governance mechanisms to reduce service costs and increase benefits through collaboration. As a typical way of cooperative governance of urban agglomeration, joint meetings play an important role in urban agglomeration cooperation. As the most important form of coordination, joint meetings are usually used between multiple jurisdictions in China to reduce transaction cost and mitigate collaboration risk. We seek to identify and better understand self-organizing coordination mechanisms embedded in formalized agreements. Specifically, we are interested in understanding characteristics of interlocal joint meetings, why did these mechanisms emergence, and what factors influence on the nature of self-organizing coordination. This paper uses 2006-2015 joint meetings data collection on local actors at city level of Yangtze River Delta, which is a typical collaborative region in China, to verify the evolution trend of bilateral and multilateral cooperation. Through the verification, we found that the Yangtze River Delta has formed a typical institutional arrangement to promote bilateral and multilateral mechanisms, but Jing-Jin-Ji Region is still in the previous stage of cooperation.

Advancing the climate change agenda presents a continuing challenge to institutional actors—e.g., national and local governments, civil society organizations—as each has its own agenda to promote, jurisdiction to protect, constituent preferences to consider, and limited resources to spend.  The need for collective action among these institutional actors is becoming more evident as the effects of climate change go beyond territorial boundaries, functional and service areas, policy domains, and political timeline.  It is a critical ingredient to climate policy as these actors are the ones with the organization, resources, capacity, and authority to make an impact and sustain efforts in the long run.   Achieving collective action among these institutional actors, however, remains an issue.  Despite the need for collective action to combat climate change, efforts have been uneven and wanting.

The paper examines underlying collective action dilemmas facing local governments in the Philippines.  It seeks to understand the barriers to collective action among local governments, the mechanisms instituted for integration and enforcement, and the effects of inter-local collaboration on participating organizations and the climate change agenda.  The study applies the Institutional Collective Action (ICA) framework (Feiock, 2013) as theoretical lens to explain what collective action dilemmas composite actors face, why they cooperate, and how they self-organize to deal with those dilemmas.   The framework can provide new perspectives and insights into climate change issues.  Thus far, the framework has been applied to resource management, local economic development, regional planning, public safety, emergency management, land use, and service delivery in metropolitan areas in the United States.

Two cases are developed for the study.  The first case examines the experience of the Allah Valley Landscape Development Alliance (AVLDA) in the provinces of Sultan Kudarat and South Cotabato in Mindanao.  The AVLDA is a multi-sectoral alliance of 13 local government units, national government agencies, non-governmental organizations formed in 2003 to protect and preserve the Allah Valley landscape (i.e., watershed, rivers, and lakes) so to minimize the vulnerabilities of local communities and increase their resilience to natural disasters, such as flooding, earthquakes, and landslides.   The second case deals with the Lanuza Bay Development Alliance (LBDA), which was formalized in 2004 by seven local government units to protect the diversity of marine and coastal resources in Lanuza bay in Surigao del Sur province in Mindanao.   The bay has come under threat from destructive fishing, siltation and degradation due to upland activities like mining and illegal logging.  Data will be collected and analyzed through various sources, such as expert consultation, interviews, focus group discussions, archival research and document review.  The cases will examine the collective action dilemmas, the facilitating and impeding factors of inter-local collaboration, and the responses of local governments.  They will be used to identify critical variables and their relationships and develop propositions that can be tested empirically for future research.  

Feiock, R. C. (2013). The Institutional Collective Action Framework. The Policy Studies Journal, 41(3), 397–425.

This paper focuses on the role of nonprofit organizations in facilitating the development of Institutional Collective Action in Northeast Asia. Focusing on the issue area of the environment, it argues that nonprofit organizations play important roles in developing the coordinating networks that facilitate policymaking among diverse policy actors and fragmented governmental authority structures.

In order to tease out the mechanics of how nonprofit organizations are using networks to facilitate Institutional Collective Action, the author conducted fieldwork in China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan and created two new datasets that include (a) 300 environmental organizations in the region and (b) 200 environmental advocacy events from around the world.  Based on these data, this paper will discuss three types of public-private networks created by nonprofits in Northeast Asia that facilitate the development of environmental policy:  1) Hub-and-spoke networks, in which nonprofits create a “hub” that connects diverse actors from the public, private, and corporate sectors through organizational membership and/or by hosting events.  2) Horizontal networks in which the nonprofits connect similar actors (e.g., municipal officials) for the purpose of piloting sustainability projects and disseminating best practices.   3) Vertical networks in which the nonprofits connect local and central government officials in ways designed to enhance the political power of pro-environmental officials in their negotiations with other parts of their own government.

None of these networks conform to many of the basic assumptions found in the policy-making literature, which require policy actors to have a single institutional affiliation and an identifiable set of hierarchically organized preferences for which they negotiate (Bosso, 2005; Dalton, 1994; Eisner, 2006; Keck & Sikkink, 1998; Kingdon, 1984; Schreurs, 2002; Vig & Kraft, 2013).   Rather, many of the actors in these policy networks have numerous social, political, and professional networks rather than a clearly defined institutional affiliation, which in turn lead to diverse rather than narrow policy preferences.   Therefore, the Institutional Action Framework (Feiock 2013) serves as a more appropriate theoretical starting point to explain these complex processes.

Thus, this paper has two main goals:  First, it aims to offer new empirical information about the ways that environmental organizations in Northeast Asia use network-creation strategies to promote pro-environmental policy creation and dissemination.  Second, it seeks to contribute to the Institutional Collective Action framework literature by developing new theoretical tools that are better able to cope with policy actors who have multiple institutional roles, diverse policy interests, and are operating in a wider range of political and cultural contexts than those found in North America and Europe, the most common source for theories about environmental policymaking.

The study aims to investigate the effect of embeddedness, defined as a property of interdependent relations in which organizations are integrated in a network on the level of collaboration risk emerging from relational uncertainty. A case of emergency management including interorganizational collaboration is used as a lens through which to understand to the role of embeddedness in disaster networks to extend the knowledge of collaboration risk within an institutional collective action framework. Despite an effort on understanding structural effects on network governance, risk embedded in collaborative arrangements has yet to be systematically explored. By modeling OLS analysis with 69 organizations engaged in emergency management operations in the Seoul Metropolitan Area, South Korea, I hypothesized and test the effect of relational and structural embeddedness on the level of collaboration risk that an organization perceives. The results show that both structural and relational embeddedness facilitate organizations to mitigate perceived collaboration risk, implying that reachability secures relief of relational risk and commitment relationship binds the participants more tightly.

As policy planning and implementation involves various stakeholders from Central and Local Government, intergovernmental problems can be found across the agencies generating policy incoherence in land use and spatial planning policy in Indonesia. This study highlights the policy problem of multi sectors relations which generates policy incoherence in land use and spatial planning policy which in turn has undermined the policy effectiveness and the capacity to mobilize resource among multiple agents with different interests.

Government Effort to manage land use and spatial planning policy is usually rely on 'order' paradigm through institutional collective action mechanism. Paradigm of order in land use and spatial planning policy will be critically analyzed in comparison with the idea of complexity framework and public policy. Complexity paradigm implies that public policy actors must continually and flexibly combine rational and interpretive strategies in public policies.  This paper discusses what the idea of complexity and complexity tools can do for cross cutting management of land use and spatial planning policy in Indonesia.

Key words: Complexity, Policy Incoherence, Intergovernmental Relationship, Land Use and Spatial Planning Policy